Monday, 3 August 2015

TweetSometimes, it’s
not so much the content of news stories which strikes me as the relationship
between two or more stories.There was a
good example of this last week, in these two stories.

The first
concerned migrants who travelled half way across the world to seek a better
life, and the second was a story about, well, migrants
travelling half way across the world to seek a better life.The first group were successful - they
planted their language and culture on faraway shores and are to be celebrated;
the second intended merely to integrate with the existing culture and language
in the country of their destination and find work, but they have mostly failed
and are to be reviled.

Unfair
comparison?In some ways, yes, of course
it is.Things were different 150 years
ago.But the core issue is that, in both
cases, we are looking at people who felt that their situation in their home
country was sufficiently desperate that they were ready to risk everything to
try and build a new and better life elsewhere.

It’s not often
that I agree with anything that the Tory MP for Monmouth says but last week was
a minor exception, when he said about the way to prevent immigration, “Fundamentally, what we need to do is take
away the incentive to come…”.I don’t
really agree with him that migration is something which necessarily needs to be
prevented, but in principle I agree that removing the incentive is the best way
of managing levels of migration.We do,
though, have very different views about what the ‘incentive to come’ might
be.He seems to see it as being poor
border control, French weakness and a too-soft system of benefits, whereas I
see it as global economic inequality.And one of the few certainties in life is that he has no real intention
of tackling that one.

As for Labour,
well their acting leader has demanded that an invoice be sent to France for the
costs incurred by the UK as a result of that country’s failings, whilst Jack
Straw has called for the abolition of the Schengen agreement and the reimposition
of border controls across the European continent.Just as well that, according to them, they’re
a party of internationalists.I dread to
think what ‘narrow nationalists’ might have suggested.

The position
taken by Leanne Wood for Plaid is more enlightened and humane, but even that
seems to be starting from the view that migration is a ‘problem’ which needs to
be ‘controlled’.That’s a difference of
degree rather than of kind.No
mainstream politicians seem to be willing to start from the position that all
people should be free to live and work wherever they choose, and that the
‘problem’ is about adapting to the implications of that freedom rather than
denying it to people.Freedom of movement is
something which seems to be restricted to “us” and not allowed to “them”.

In a globally
connected world, it’s very easy for people to see that they can make a better
life for themselves elsewhere.And who
can blame them for seeking that?Building barriers, fences, and blockades might look like a solution to
some, but it is nothing more than a short term way of protecting the relative
wealth of some parts of the world from people in other parts of the world by
locking them out.

The rational
long term approach is to redistribute the world’s wealth more fairly.And given that much of the wealth of the
developed world came from exploiting the rest of the world in the first place,
it’s an entirely reasonable objective to set.But I won't hold my breath. I expect to see the UK’s political parties continuing to argue about
who can build the strongest barriers, and keep out the largest number of
migrants.Freedom of movement is an
alien concept to them when applied to ‘others’.